About Me

my name is kate, and i'm a new england expatriate living in DC by way of chicago. i work in development for a non-profit, and i spend my spare time fighting the patriarchy and reading things. oh all right, i watch "project runway" too.

Sunday, November 30, 2008

paper.

the other night, while lolling about with the family out in virginia, we got talking about the weird things you encounter in college. and i remembered this.

it is the very end of my senior year, late on a may night- 2:00, maybe 3:00 am - and we are walking through southwest on our way back to one of the dorms. we are, unsurprisingly, very drunk.

southwest, for those unfamiliar with umass, is sometimes referred to as the concrete jungle - it is brick and stone and pavement everywhere. five high-rise dorms and a dozen or so smaller ones. we're walking by one of these high-rises when a piece of paper falls at my feet. i look down. and suddenly, there's another. and another. and another. i look up.

paper is raining from the sky. big, white sheets of notebook paper, cascading from somewhere above us, fluttering and diving and sliding to the ground all around us. i bend down to pick one up. it is blank.

they are all blank.

at the time, i just laughed and laughed - the alcohol helped with that, no doubt - but the memory of it still makes me smile today. i think it's because it was so nonsensical - there was absolutely no way to answer the "why?" of it. i mean, who takes the time to cut the screen out of a window twenty stories up, just to toss sheaves of blank paper out of it? who knows. it meant nothing. so, of course, it could mean anything.

6 comments:

The most surreal moment for me was the Summer after my senior year. I was living in the frat house at the time. Anyhow, it was Saturday morning, and all I vaguely remember is being up late the night before partying my brains out. I get up, go downstairs, walk into the dining room and open the door to the basement, planning on grabbing a beer and watching some TV. And someone had stuffed a full-sized rowboat down the basement staircase. I looked at it for a moment, shrugged, and took the other set of stairs down to the basement instead. I don't recall who removed the boat later or if it got back to its original owners. But that image of the back end of a boat confronting me from the basement door stays with me almost two decades later.

One night in college I was drunk with a bunch of friends walking down State Street and my friend Lis found a hundred dollar bill lying on the street. Really, if you think about it, that does not happen that often (it's the first and so far last time for me). We were all very drunk and very excited about Lis finding that money.

Twenty or thirty minutes later we were at a bar and had spent most of the found money on shots which I hope to god we drank though I don't recall for certain. This was in the late 1990s when it seemed like things were going well (also we were Americans - did I mention that? - and therefore reckless).

There's nothing particularly whimsical about this story so it sort of goes against one of the themes of the original post. However my comment is about "paper" in a get-that-money hip-hop kind of way and I do like hip-hop. But then again who doesn't these days.